There is a way to Çatalhöyük, which offers the viewer two sensations shortly before arrival.

The first is the elongated arched roof that rises like a stranded zeppelin over the undulating landscape in the middle of the Anatolian wasteland.

Below are the most important remains of the Neolithic settlement.

And then there is a tree, right next to a sign pointing to the archaeological reserve, the only one far and wide.

Anatolian wasteland.

Why should people have settled here?

Andreas Platthaus

Editor in charge of literature and literary life.

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They did it, almost ten thousand years ago, and for the next eighteen centuries, if one may believe the research findings so far.

They like to place reconstruction drawings of the settlement in an area interspersed with water surfaces, from which the "fork hill", which is divided into two elevations (that means the Turkish name Çatalhöyük; it refers to the division), still protrudes slightly above the plateau.

The Çarşamba, a river that rises in the Taurus Mountains to the south, used to provide extensive wetlands; Today it is dammed up to a lake long before Çatalhöyük in order to guarantee the water supply for the agricultural areas, and what remains of the river, which is only a hundred kilometers long, is distributed over various irrigation channels; suddenly the Çarşamba is simply no longer there.

It used to be similar, it is a river that never reached the sea.

But it brought much more water to the area north of what is now the city of Çumra.

It has only existed as an amalgamation of several small towns since 1926, and the only thing the world knows about the town is that its administrative area also includes Çatalhöyük, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012. The past has left a great gift for the present.

Life on roof terraces

Thousands of years it lay well-wrapped and hidden, leveled by wind and weather and covered by cemeteries during classical antiquity (the Roman and Byzantine empires still had subjects here) until an expedition of British scientists began with it in 1961, which was only shortly before much older archaeological site recognized mound to be excavated. In four years, the foundations of more than 160 houses, which had formed a fortress-like structure here, were built close to one another - so close that there could have been no alleys between them.

And even more peculiar: the preserved foundation walls showed no traces of doors. One must imagine the settlement, which was named Çatalhöyük after the place where it was found, as a collection of buildings that were entered through inlets in the flat roofs. Life in the narrower settlement area took place mainly on a roof terrace landscape, the various levels of which could be reached via ladders. That promised better protection from wild animals and neighbors who have gone wild.